


If You Were Gay

by ChipsandChicken



Category: Avenue Q - Lopez/Marx, Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Avenue Q, Canon Gay Relationship, M/M, POV Finn (Star Wars), POV Poe Dameron, Songfic, Stormpilot, fight me
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-24
Updated: 2018-02-24
Packaged: 2019-03-23 13:12:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13788456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChipsandChicken/pseuds/ChipsandChicken
Summary: Based on the song from Avenue Q: After a long day, Finn and Poe have a very frank discussion. It goes poorly.This is pure fluff.Fight me Rian Johnson.





	1. Finn

    It wasn’t like it was a book about _musicals_ or anything. Christ, it was titled _Your X Wing and You: Mechanics for Dummies_! Rey had lent it to him last week, and Finn was pretty excited to be finally able to sit down and read it. Not that he was particularly busy, of course: he’d recently quit the only job he’d ever had-- basically told Gwen Phasma to jump in a garbage chute when he’d gone, which had been very satisfying but in retrospect not good career planning-- and his new job was on demand only.

    Rey had hooked him up with  _ her _ new boss, Leia “The General” Organa, who took the term freelance as gospel and ran a dubiously legal vigilante mechanic shop. The General had not only not cared that he had gotten a truly scathing parting recommendation from Phasma and First Order, she’d thought it was genuinely hilarious.  _ “My idiot son works there, robbing from the poor to feed the morally bankrupt” _ , she’d chuckled, clapping him on the back soundly and directing him to report to his supervisor, pilot extraordinaire Poe Dameron. He’d been stunned to find that the guy that everyone was going on about was not only barely five years older than him, but also incredibly good looking and charismatic to boot. No wonder he was so popular. A man like that could be bad at flying a Fisher Price plane and still be a famous pilot. 

    Poe Dameron was the kind of man you put on posters in Times Square-- magnificent curly hair and dark features, with the uncanny ability to make scruffy look like the next big thing. He was all smiles when Finn approached him for the first time, leaning picturesquely against a “requisitioned” (read: stolen) crop duster that was being rebuilt to be given to a family outside town that had lost theirs due to financing problems. 

    When Finn had immediately rattled off his employee ID number instead of his name in a fit of nerves, Poe had frowned a little, clapped him on the back, and said gently, “I’m gonna call you Finn, okay?” All it had taken was Rey passing by, calling over her shoulder that Finn was kind of homeless since he’d been previously living in company housing, and Poe had immediately ordered him to move in, no argument allowed.

    And that was how he’d ended up here, curled up on Poe Dameron’s couch in Poe Dameron’s apartment, with all of his possessions in the spare room.  It seemed like something out of a dream: he was gainfully employed by a ragtag group of what were basically everyday superheroes, his room and board were paid for by the philanthropic and surprisingly affluent General (something about her being from an extinct line of royalty had been mentioned, but Finn wasn’t sure he believed that), he’d somehow convinced Rey to be his best friend, even though he was pretty sure she thought he was clingy and a bit weird, and he was living in the apartment of a walking, talking God among men. 

    Who  _ never. Left. Him. Alone.  _ Seriously. Finn was pretty sure that Poe had a job-- they worked together, and Poe was about as in-demand as a superstar pilot with a talent for repairs could be in an entirely illegal underworld of operations. He and Rey had recently refurbished a fighter jet for a local pilot who’d crashed it one too many times and was facing reprimand if his superiors saw it trashed. They’d also thrown in flight lessons, for reasons of public service. The two of them hadn’t shut up about it for the past three weeks, about how  _ long _ and  _ tiring  _ it was. And yet any time Finn was home, Poe was too. If Finn was just getting back from a long job in some godforsaken backwater, Poe was on the couch watching reruns of Cake Boss, waiting up with a, “Hey buddy, how’d it go?” If he was coming in from getting groceries, Poe was there to help get them in with a sympathetic grimace and a complaint about there being no elevator in the five floor walkup. 

    And god knows that Finn wasn’t complaining about the company. If he had to have a codependent roommate, it was better that it be someone he could stand like Poe. The problem was with _ him _ . It was dizzying, seeing Poe’s quick grin and hearing “Hey buddy” everywhere he turned. At First Order he’d lived alone, and nobody had given a flying bootlace how his day had gone, or if he needed help with groceries. He’d had a couple decent friends, but for the most part he worked a desk job for thankless pay and came home to an empty apartment. Until, of course, they’d repossessed Rey’s workplace, some old garage on Jakku, right below the Shapani Bypass Highway. 

    He’d been put on helping out with the repossession after flubbing a piece of paperwork in the wake of the frankly brutal firing of one of his friends. Kind of a temporary/potentially permanent demotion. But he’d seen Rey, screaming furiously at their team as they trashed the place, and he’d grabbed her hand and ran off. She’d beaten him soundly around the head for that, but he’d seen the repo ‘troopers do some serious damage to people who interfered with the job. They’d somehow managed to stay bundled together ever since, and while thankful was starting to feel like a part of his personality lineup, he wasn’t sure he’d ever get over how lucky he was to have found her and Poe.

    Even if Poe’s constant presence was driving him to distraction. 

    But tonight, Poe was  _ not _ home. He was not hogging up the couch in that stupid flight suit he definitely only wore because he knew how good he looked in it. He was not singing obnoxiously loud Britney Spears in the shower, or burning holes in their pans in the kitchen. He wasn’t even lounging on his bed with the door wide open, on Skype with his godfather and barking with laughter at some truly ridiculous and petty act of vengeance L’ulo had pulled.

    No, the apartment was eerily, blissfully quiet, and so Finn settled contentedly into the arm of the couch, Poe’s cat BB-8 (a nickname acquired in trying to keep all the orange kittens straight during early life care, Finn was led to understand) curled up in his customary ball on Finn’s feet, trying to ignore the niggling feeling that Poe was going to pop up any second and completely harsh the calm. He flipped open his book to the pages Rey had mercilessly dog-eared for him.  _ “I marked the parts you need to work on,”  _ she’d told him brusquely, thrusting the book into his hands before sprinting off to make the long drive back to her little hole in the wall, all the way past the outer rim of the city, on Ahch-To. She’d been being nice, in her Rey way, but almost every chapter was dog eared. The book didn’t even lay flat anymore without popping up a bit. It was... disheartening, to say the least. 

    He turned to the first section, and had gotten no further than  _ Maneuvering your Starfighter _ \-- the first chapter, which advised him very sagely to try  _ not _ to crash it, especially the T-65, as those apparently had the nasty habit of exploding on impact-- before he heard the telltale sound of a key turning in the lock. He held his breath, screwing his eyes shut and praying that it was just a neighbor coming home, that he was being paranoid,  _ please _ don’t let it be-- “Hey buddy! You still up?”

    BB-8 hopped up from Finn’s feet, lolling over to wind himself around Poe’s ankles, chirruping affectionately as his owner afforded him one of his trademarked Dameron grins and reached down to scratch him behind the ears. Finn pretended not to hear, trying in vain to focus on his book, which was saying something now about which  _ gear _ to drive in on casual speeds, but Poe took no notice of his pretend preoccupation, swooping in noiselessly behind him and craning down so that his face was directly next to Finn’s. 

    If Finn had been able to think straight through the cloud of  _ Poe _ smell, he’d probably have laughed at the scrunched up look on his roommate’s face as the older man read the book incredulously over Finn’s shoulder. “Rey give you that?” he asked simply, shucking his jacket off and straightening. Finn nodded, sighing a little and closing the book with half-hearted regret. A small -- very small and very  _ shut up stupid _ \-- part of him was tempted to keep pretending to read, so that Poe would keep inserting himself into Finn’s space in a bid for his attention. That  _ was _ usually how things worked, but Finn snuck a glance at Poe’s face as he folded up his new jacket carefully and tossed it into the coat closet. Poe looked worn, drawn. He was clearly tired. Smiling, but exhausted. Finn felt a pang of sympathy, and was wracking his brain for a way to tell him to go the hell to bed without sounding nagging, or worse,  _ suggestive, _ when Poe flopped down gracelessly onto Finn’s legs, splaying all over the couch with a tired smile. 

    Finn grunted in displeasure, but Poe beamed back, and tossed his hair, saying, “Wanna order some Thai food?” Finn checked his phone. 1:24 am. He squinted at his roommate. “You know they’re closed right now-- was that a  _ pun _ ?” Poe’s smile brightened by 20 watts and Finn groaned, rolling his head back dramatically. “Oh come on, buddy! I just finished a titan 6 tie fighter repair  _ marathon _ for Maz’s racing thing, it was funny!”

    Finn levelled his best Stern Look at Poe (he’d been practicing on Rey after finding out that she was hoarding repair supplies in a cupboard at the base, a habit left over from her job on Jakku). He fluttered his eyelashes innocently, and Finn groaned again, sliding out from under Poe’s legs and staggering off to the kitchenette, grumbling a little while his hip ached loudly at him for sitting so long. He rifled through the pantry, ignoring Poe’s delighted coos over Bee, shuffling things around until he found a packet of crisps still left unopened. He wrinkled his nose, but staggered over to the cabinet to fetch them a bowl, because portion control was easier when things weren’t in a bag, and Bee was going to end up suffocating in the plastic when Poe inevitably let him eat their snack. As he poured the chips out into a large plastic bowl, he heard Poe clear his throat in the other room. Finn paused. That was a Talk throat-clear. The last time he’d heard that was when Poe had told him that not everything in the apartment needed to be clean and in its place every second of the day. Rough talk. 

    “So,” Poe started, calling out from the couch where his head had appeared over the back. Finn winced, his back to the couch. Yep. Definitely a Talk. There went his dreams of bed before 3am.

    He picked up the bowl and picked his way back to the couch, aware of Poe’s eyes on him all the while, his roommate primed to speak. His legs had drawn up to make space, and so Finn resumed his position on the couch, wordlessly offering Poe some crisps. Poe shook his head, opening and closing his mouth as if unsure of how to put what he had to say. Finn’s stomach dropped out the bottom of his shoes. If Poe was refusing food, nothing good was on its way. Maybe he’d tell him that Finn needed to look for a new place. Maybe the folding of the towels this weekend had been too much, and he  _ should  _ have just hung them up, in retrospect, they didn’t need to be folded, oh god he was going to be homeless over  _ towels _ \-- “You have a good weekend?” Finn blinked at Poe, a crisp halfway to his mouth, his mind shorting. “W-what?” 

    “Your weekend. Was it good?”

    “Poe, I saw you this morning. And it’s Tuesday.”

    Poe smacked his forehead with the heel of his hand and Finn squinted at him. “Jeez, was that really this morning!” he exclaimed, rubbing his hand into his unruly tangle of hair. He must be even more tired than he looked. Finn shifted in his seat, ready to get naggy if it meant Poe going to bed, but Poe’s legs came back down on Finn’s lap, jostling the crisps and effectively trapping him. Poe shot him a smile, but it wasn’t anywhere near bright or convincing. It looked almost... unsettled. 

    “Peanut had me running ragged cleaning up after her all day, the General almost had a  _ fit  _ when she saw the mess in the landing stripe.” Poe went on conversationally, craning up for a handful of crisps and plopping back against the arm of the couch as though there was no weirdness. But there  _ was _ weirdness, Finn could smell it. He had a nose for it, and it almost always got him in big, bad, horrible trouble. “I bet,” Finn said cautiously, keeping a close watch on Poe as he fed Bee a crisp. BB-8 chirped happily and dashed off to roll around the floor with the crisp, more delighted to play with it than eat it. “That girl could make a mess out of an empty room and still find an excuse not to clean it up. But at least you’re done now.” he finished. Poe closed his eyes and huffed out a heavy sigh. “That’s the damn truth.” 

    The silence that followed should have been companionable, but as it stretched on, Finn realized incredulously that Poe was  _ not _ going to go on. Or maybe he was waiting for Finn to bring something up-- towels, jesus, it was probably still the  _ towels _ should he just admit that folding them and then balancing them on top of the hanging rack was insane or should he stand by it and burn for it-- but either way, the only sound in the room for a whole 3 minute eternity was BB-8 clattering around with something he definitely wasn’t supposed to have, chip discarded on the carpet in favor of something more jingly. Poe didn’t move, settling into his seat with his eyes closed and occasionally popping a crisp into his mouth from his fist. Finally, when Finn’s eyes started to itch (or maybe twitch, the left one definitely felt twitchy), he sighed, setting the crisps down on the coffee table and sliding out from under Poe’s feet for a second time. Poe’s eyes flew open in surprise, and what looked like alarm, and Finn said quickly, “Well, I’m gonna go to bed--”

    “So this evening I was on the tram, and I met this guy.” Poe spoke all at once, in what sounded like it was supposed to be a casual way, but instead was more of a jumbled mess. Finn froze, half crouching from where he’d been rising. Bee rolled off when the thing he was playing with starting sounding like it was fighting back. Probably Poe’s keys, which never seemed to make it to the counter where they were habitually tossed. “Oh?” Finn asked, when it became clear that Poe was not only waiting for a response, but also resolutely staring at the crisps in his fist instead of Finn. Finn went through a mental inventory: Poe hadn’t seemed tussled, so he hadn’t been attacked, and his wallet had gone on the floor with his keys, so he hadn’t been mugged. Why was this guy important? Maybe an old friend of L’ulo’s? A fan of really nice leather jackets? 

    “Yeah, and he kept talking to me, and laughing with me.” Finn continued staring, waiting for there to be a point. Poe glanced up at him and then back at the crisps before clearing his throat. “I think, uh, I think he might have, em, thought I was gay. That he was, you know, hitting on me, I mean.” Poe’s cheeks darkened and he cleared his throat for the thousand and fourth time. Finn’s brain was circus music. This was not a talk, or even a Talk. This was an Intervention, and whatever it was was related to... to  _ feelings  _ stuff, feelings stuff they were not going to talk about. Finn forced out a blithe laugh that sounded more like someone had thrown a squeaky toy at a large mouse.  _ Nailed it. _ “Okay?” he said, chuckling in that deranged way again. Actually, he couldn’t seem to stop. He pursed his mouth shut, trying to stifle the nervous, crazy laughter that was bubbling up in droves.

    Poe was looking at him now,  _ squinting  _ at him really, as if trying to ferret something out of him. “And it got me thinking. About you.” Circus music? No, no, it was ear-splitting, deafening Mahler, he was sure of it. Who even knew what the hell Mahler sounded like, but it was, and it was going off in his brain and battering his eardrums from the inside so badly he was pretty sure he was going to start bleeding from the ears soon. Maybe then he could go to the hospital, and away from this conversation, because any way this could go was a one way ticket to Nopeville. 

    Somewhere, through time and space, he heard himself sputter, like a moron, “Sorry-me? What me? I mean, what about--” 

    Poe had sat up at some point, and was now rising slowly, his hands raised as if he was trying not to frighten a particularly skittish animal. His crisps had fallen to the ground, but even BB-8 knew better than to come over and scavenge just now. “I just, you know, if you were, it would be okay.” The music stopped. What? He was saying that he thought-- where did he get the idea that-- was it the goddamn  _ towels _ because it was totally normal to want a clean and orderly bathroom, even if he was admittedly a bit neurotic about how that was done. “If I was... what?” 

    “Gay.”

    Silence. 

    “What?”

    “More than okay, that would be-- I would be so fine with that.” 

    So this was how the world ended. This was how Finn died. He beat a hasty retreat away from Poe, who had reached for his shoulders, and he nearly tripped on a pile of jackets and socks awaiting cleaning he hadn’t noticed before. “Oh god,” he muttered, flailing wildly as he tried gracelessly to regain some semblance of physical balance, since his mental state was pretty decently shot. “Better than fine!” Poe cried, following after him, clearly concerned for his sanity. Fine. Fair. Someone should probably go ahead and kill him now. It would be a mercy at this point. “I mean, if  _ I  _ were gay, which I’m not saying I  _ am,  _ but if I  _ was,  _ you’d-- I’d totally go for you, you know? If I was. Gay.” Poe stuttered to a stop, looking uncharacteristically distressed. Death would be far preferable. Finn was prepared to offer a generous pension to whoever did it. All his life savings for a quick death, right damn now. Poe drew up next to Finn, not daring to reach for him again. Finn looked like he’d rather swallow knives than exist anywhere in this hemisphere at the moment. “Please stop.”

    “Really, I mean it!”

    “ _ Stop _ .”

    “It doesn’t matter to me what you do.”

    “Please!”

    “In bed.”

    “Poe, I  _ mean  _ it!”

    “With other guys.”

    “ _ Poe!” _

    “I’m just saying!”

    “Stop saying! Don’t say-- no more saying!” Finn was pacing madly now, flapping his arms wildly. Poe kept pace with him, relentlessly pressing on. 

    “We should be able to talk about this, you’re my best buddy--”

    “Nope,  _ no _ , nothing to talk about! No talking!”

    “Buddy--”

    Suddenly Finn drew up short, turning to face Poe, and for a second, Poe remembered that Finn had been part of a brute squad once, had been an intimidator who had learned combat from a funded source. “No, Poe!” he shouted, face reddened beyond belief and hands shaking as he swiped them madly through the air. “I am not having this conversation! And by the way,  _ I am not gay! _ ” Poe’s stomach sank, and Finn whirled around, storming down the hall. He tried calling after him, “I mean it, Finn--” But the younger man just shouted back, “No, _ I _ mean it! Jesus!” 

    He followed him to the door, calling out right up until it slammed in his face. “Finn, don’t-- come back, I’m sorry, I--- shit.”

    In his room, Finn buried himself in his bed, angrily swiping away the mortified tears that were starting to fall, and punching his pillow repeatedly. 

_     Bet you wish it had been towels, huh?  _

 


	2. Chapter 2

    Out in the hall, Poe sighed heavily, his hand resting on the doorknob. His instinct was to go in and try to explain, but his instinct on the ground was almost always wrong. Especially with Finn, it seemed. So instead he went back to the living room, pulling his phone out of his pocket and flopping down onto the couch again. He punched in a number and waited. 

    “Hello?”

    “Hey Peanut.”

    “How’d it go?”

    “I fucked up. Bad.”

    “It couldn’t be  _ that _ bad.”

    “I got nervous and strongly implied to him I was straight.”

    “ _ What. _ ”

    “And then I mentioned him in bed with other guys!”

    “Poe.”

    “Yes?”

    “You’re a dumbass.”

    “Yes.”

    “You know what you have to do, right?”

    “Fix it?”

    “Fucking  _ fix it _ . Chewie doesn't have enough space in the RV for Finn to live with us, and  _ you’re _ impossible without him, all mopey and doe-eyed and  _ useless _ . So fix. It.” 

    “You’re right.”

    “Damn straight I am.”

    Rey hung up on him at once, leaving him sagged against Finn’s door, which he had unknowingly walked over to during the call, with a mute phone pressed to his ear. On the other side of the door, he heard Finn moving restlessly around the room, and, for a horrible instant, he imagined that he’d finally managed to piss him off enough to convince him that he needed to move out. That was always something that seemed to be lingering around the apartment; Poe thought he could feel it especially thick in the air tonight, and he wondered if it was because they were coming up on six months living together, and neither of them had discussed Finn getting his own place. 

    That would be the worst thing that could happen. 

    Poe had lived alone for a long time-- longer than he was strictly comfortable admitting-- and he’d been pretty sure he would have liked to go on living alone, until he took Finn in on one of his crazy whims all those months ago. He’d literally just met him, knew nothing about him, but the instant Rey mentioned he had nowhere to go, he’d offered up his spare room, which not only had no bed at the time, but also no closet or bathroom access. The latter he could do nothing about, but in the fifteen hours he’d had before Finn had moved in that evening, he had dashed off from work, raiding Ikea like a madman and using all of his considerable engineering skills trying to construct the bed and unpronounceable wardrobe set before Finn got home from his first shift with all his stuff. He’d been unsuccessful, unsurprisingly, and he hadn’t even noticed that Finn had let himself in and was standing in the door until the younger man said, “If you don’t have space for me, you don’t have to--” Poe jumped up, sensing that Finn was about to offer to leave, and instead said, gesticulating wildly with the wrench (for some reason not provided with the extensive hardware in the bed set, because Ikea is the brand for sadists and lunatics, of which Poe Dameron was evidently both), “Grab a part and help me decode this stupid diagram, would you?” 

    His voice had sounded crazy and tired and strung out, and Finn had stared at him for a long minute, until finally his face relaxed into that big, slow smile of his, and he plopped down his stuff and took the wrench carefully from Poe’s hands. They’d spent the remainder of the night battling bravely against the evil furniture, but ultimately ended up relegating Finn to the couch until Peanut could make time to come and use her magic touch on the satanic nonsense. 

    It took them sixteen hours to give up, and her three to call them incompetent idiots and screw in the last bolt. But since that first conversation, standing in that very doorway, there had been no more talk of Finn leaving. Poe had thought that it was understood that he  _ liked _ Finn being there. A lot. A real lot. He’d planned a whole speech tonight, about how Finn being into men would be better than fine, kind of perfect really, because he’d never been one for boys but Finn seemed to be the bright and shiny exception. His whole life had kind of fallen in place around him, and he’d wanted it to be a comforting, non-confrontational speech, full of support, and not pushing his highly repressed and very jumpy buddy any more than he had to. 

    And then Maz had called in a repair for a drag racing event, and that turned into six repairs because  _ drag racing _ and then he’d been tired, and now he’d cocked it all up. His nice, comforting speech had turned into “it doesn’t matter to me if you sleep with other guys”, which was not only categorically untrue, but also the exact opposite of any shade of comforting. And now, well. Now for all he knew Finn was packing up his stuff into that stupid duffel bag of his -- ‘What could I possibly need a suitcase for, Poe? Vacation? Does anyone actually do those?’ -- and getting ready to blow out of his life as quickly as he’d blown in. It wasn’t like he had a contract with the General. They were a strictly paper-free organization, because of all the crime. He could be gone tomorrow and nobody would ever hear from him again, except maybe Peanut, because Poe was pretty sure she was kind of the first real friend Finn had ever had. 

    “Fuck,” he muttered under his breath, carding a hand through his hair irritably. He needed to fix this. Now. Now was better than later, that’s what L’ulo would say. Well, okay, maybe that would be accompanied by a “you dumbass”, but the thought was the same. And he didn’t think Peanut would let him escape with his nethers intact if he let Finn dash off in mortification like this, not to even  _ contemplate  _ what the General would do when she found out. Poe shuddered at the thought. She might actually shoot him this time. She’d be sorry for it, he was sure, but she would also definitely do it. Right. Time to be a man and go tell his roommate that he wanted to take him on a date. 

_     “Fuck.”  _

**Author's Note:**

> I write fanfics instead of my actual stories and went to arts school for nothing, so check out my other surprisingly readable crap!  
> -Chips


End file.
